After The Flag

                      The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.
                                                                                                Georges Bernanos
                      Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
                                                                         The White Queen, in Through The Looking Glass
    As a native southerner I say this about moves against the Confederate flag:  Good riddance. It is a symbol of bigotry and, for some, a license to kill. It has no proper place in contemporary public life.
    The general applause for these moves represents an ironic turn of events.  Traditionally, on matters of race, the rest of the nation has liked to look away with scorn to Dixie.  A sordid and shameful strain in this region's history has enabled selective recollection of history in other back yards. Of segregated schools in the Northeast and upper Midwest; segregated public accommodations and even entire towns in New England;  anti-miscegenation laws in most of the lower 48 states. And so on.
    History will likely right itself in the long term. Meanwhile, we are left to deal with the realities of here and now.  One of these is the ordinary human yen to think of racism as someone else's sin. Another is the temptation to believe that we may finally have the problem on the run -- to feel good about melting the tip of an iceberg, in the case of the flag.
    Still another can he heard among politicians and commentators on the right. They are signaling that they sense in their target constituency an issue-weariness on race. After the Charleston church massacre they strained to avoid calling it what it was: A classic racial hate crime.  In a bizarre aside, the editorialists at The Wall Street Journal thought it timely to assert that institutional racism no longer exists in America.
    Without evidence that The White Queen works at The Journal, we may conclude that the editorialists don't get out much, and that their office windows do not afford them a clear view of, say, the criminal justice system.
    The politics and atmospherics of race have not been good these days. Politicians have worked openly to inhibit minority voting.  Our African-American president has been mocked and reviled in some quarters, even by some in Congress. See, for example,  the Norfolk, Nebraska parade float portraying an outhouse as the Obama Presidential Library. See the collected sayings of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz. (Senator Cruz's rhetoric is best sampled when there will be time afterward to take a shower.)
        Notwithstanding White Queen commentators and pandering politicians, institutional racism is still alive. Minorities are disadvantaged in health care, even in access to grocery shopping. They have been afflicted by the banking, insurance and mortgage industries. Racial disparity is sharply increasing  in schools, especially in the urban Northeast.
       To say that we are all responsible is not to say that we are all bigots. It is, rather, to say that we are not always attentive to what is produced or permitted by the accretion of our everyday behaviors.
       Symbols matter. Rejecting a hateful symbol matters.  But symbolism can't substitute for the glamourless work of diligent citizenship: For listening when we're told that minority schools are flagging a few miles from our homes;  for remembering that the politicians passing those ugly voting laws were elected from polling places like the one down the street.